Molecular biologists at the Research Centre for Agriculture and Forestry Laimburg in Northern Italy, have developed a semi-automated procedure for extracting and isolating high quality DNA from cereal crops, using the Te-MagS™ magnetic separation module from Tecan.

The researchers are performing large-scale microsatellite marker analysis to genetically characterize local cereal landraces, in order to establish and maintain a germplasm collection for these crops.

“Isolation of DNA from plant tissue represents a crucial step for the quality and outcome of subsequent downstream applications, such as PCR, sequencing or genotyping, but this step can also be a considerable bottleneck for extensive plant genotyping studies,” explained Dr Sanja Baric, head of the Molecular Biology Section at the research centre.

“The semi-automated magnetic bead-based separation procedure that we have established with the Te-MagS has at least doubled our throughput and more than halved the manual labor time compared to conventional cetyl-trimethylammonium bromide (CTAB)-based protocols.”

Dr Baric’s set-up includes a Tecan Freedom EVO® 100 liquid handling workstation with an integrated Te-MagS module for fully automated DNA isolation from manually prepared plant lysates. The final DNA elutes from 48 samples can be prepared within 90 minutes, and are of sufficient quality to give amplification of many different microsatellite loci.